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Gender Studies: A ‘Cheeky Knowledge’ Renormalised?

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Gender Studies and the New Academic Governance

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Abstract

Our contribution investigates the institutionalisation process of gender studies in a Swiss French-speaking university, with a particular focus on its articulation with local social demands. The new academic governance has transformed the debates around such studies in a way that might have been expected to benefit gender studies, whose interdisciplinarity was initially seen as an undeniable advantage. Nevertheless, comparison with the changes that have occurred over the past 25 years in another interdisciplinary field of knowledge, area studies, suggests that the social resistances and new scientific objects offered by women’s/gender studies or area studies tend to be diluted under the joint influence of new social demands, fragmentation and globalisation, paving the way for new (?) academic disciplinary definitions that bring back to normal the ‘cheeky knowledge’ built by these studies.

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Acknowledgement

We are grateful to Damien Michelet, coordinator of the Interfaculty Gender Studies Platform (PlaGe) at the University of Lausanne and of the French-speaking Swiss network Gender Campus, for his attentive reading and his constructive, informed and positive comments.

All the translations from French were done by Richard Nice, whom we would like to thank very much for doing a wonderful job.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Lausanne, Switzerland

    Farinaz Fassa & Sabine Kradolfer

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  1. Farinaz Fassa
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  2. Sabine Kradolfer
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Correspondence to Farinaz Fassa .

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  1. Ruhr-Universität Bochum , Bochum, Germany

    Heike Kahlert

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Fassa, F., Kradolfer, S. (2018). Gender Studies: A ‘Cheeky Knowledge’ Renormalised?. In: Kahlert, H. (eds) Gender Studies and the New Academic Governance. Springer VS, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-19853-4_10

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-19853-4_10

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